Ok, so here is my best Pete Kansas Ave Mexican joint review impersonation.
Mrs. Gooch and I headed down to waaay south Wichita to try this fabled chicken at Krispy's Chicken. It is quite the drive from my house in NW Wichita or as Trim always referred to it as Hutch
. Pulled in to the parking lot and as you can see they really rolled the red carpet out for us with a spot right in front of the door. The building was much nicer than I expected. They really polished up a turd here.
As we entered the building we were greeted by a blast of very hot chicken grease filled air. I did smell delicious but it was uncomfortably warm in there. As we perused the menu the Asian girl behind the counter seemed a bit uneasy that we did not know exactly what we wanted. We were there for chicken of course we were just trying to decide on sides. She was very friendly and said just yell at me when you are ready to order and proceeded to go to the window to pack an order. We both settled on a two piece white. I'm a breast man what can I say? Sides were a large mashed potatoes & gravy and large fried okra. The girl proceeded to tell us it would be about a five minute wait for chicken. She seemed overly apologetic about this wait. I told her no worries as I knew we would be getting super fresh chicken. The price? $12 and change. As I was being rung up for this an Asian dude behind the counter came up apologized yet again and said it would be a five minute wait. Again I assured him this was not an issue.
As for the fellow clientele in there. They seemed to be strictly "south siders". This is clearly not a "destination" dinning location. This guy with the tear drop tattoo did not seem to be as receptive as I was to the five minute wait. He did however stick it out which lead me to believe that this chicken might be legit.
The mashed potatoes and gravy was a one large container with the gravy on top of the scoop of taters. This concerned me greatly as I thought the gravy to potatoes ratio would be to heavily skewed to the potatoes side. It was not and you could really control the ratio on how you maneuvered your spoon. This would obviously only works in a his and hers situation and you did not mind eating out of the same container as your partner. The gravy was a peppered white gravy. Very tasty. The okra was very bland.
Now for the chicken. It was served smoking ass hot in a paper boat type container. This is a terrible but frugal choice by the management. This does not allow the chicken to breath and caused a soggy crust condition as I had to wait for this to cool before eating. The crust is a light batter not heavily seasoned. In my opinion it needs more spice. It is very similar to Church's. The chicken itself was moist and generally good. You could contribute the moistness more to the fact that this chicken had come directly out of the fryer to the table. You can tell they do not marinate their chicken. They should as this is key for great fried chicken IMO. All in all it is an adequate piece of fried chicken. The sun was getting low in the sky so we quickly finished our meal and got the eff out, you know cause crime and all.
Final thoughts? This truly is something in Wichita that does not suck. It's not bad but also nothing special. It is very meh. Much like Wichita itself it is adequate but nothing to go out of your way to experience. So if for some truly unfortunate reason you find yourself in that neck (pun intended) of Wichita give it a try.